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Everyday security threats explores public perceptions of security threats in contemporary Britain, using data from extensive fieldwork and drawing on perspectives from International Relations, security studies and political psychology.

Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system.The Unheavenly Chorusis the most comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America ever undertaken--and its findings are sobering. The Unheavenly Chorusis the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests--membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on numerous in-depth surveys of members of the public as well as the largest database of interest organizations ever created--representing more than thirty-five thousand organizations over a twenty-five-year period--this book conclusively demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. The well educated and affluent are active in many ways to make their voices heard, while the less advantaged are not. This book reveals how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down across generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities--and more. In a true democracy, the preferences and needs of all citizens deserve equal consideration. Yet equal consideration is only possible with equal citizen voice.The Unheavenly Chorusreveals how far we really are from the democratic ideal and how hard it would be to attain it.

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, why are the notable democracies of the United States, India, and Israel building massive walls and fences on their borders? Despite predictions of a borderless world through globalization, these three countries alone have built security barriers totaling an astonishing 5,700 kilometers in length. In this groundbreaking work, Reece Jones analyzes how these controversial walls were justified, their impact on those living behind them, and the long-term effects of the hardening of political boundaries. Border Walls is a bold, important intervention that demonstrates that the exclusion and violence necessary to secure the borders of the modern state often undermine the very ideals of freedom and democracy the barriers are meant to protect.

For the last sixty years, American foreign and defense policymaking has been dominated by a network of institutions created by one piece of legislation--the 1947 National Security Act. This is the definitive study of the intense political and bureaucratic struggles that surrounded the passage and initial implementation of the law. Focusing on the critical years from 1937 to 1960, Douglas Stuart shows how disputes over the lessons of Pearl Harbor and World War II informed the debates that culminated in the legislation, and how the new national security agencies were subsequently transformed by battles over missions, budgets, and influence during the early cold war. Stuart provides an in-depth account of the fight over Truman's plan for unification of the armed services, demonstrating how this dispute colored debates about institutional reform. He traces the rise of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the transformation of the CIA, and the institutionalization of the National Security Council. He also illustrates how the development of this network of national security institutions resulted in the progressive marginalization of the State Department. Stuart concludes with some insights that will be of value to anyone interested in the current debate over institutional reform.

Challenging and accessible, this book opens up new political questions as it describes the new ways in which life has become more comprehensively securitised.'Professor Michael Dillon, Politics and International Relations, Lancaster UniversityThe contemporary political imagination and social landscape are saturated by the idea of security and thoughts of insecurity. This saturation has been accompanied by the emergence of a minor industry generating ideas about how to define and redefine security, how to defend and improve it, how to widen and deepen it, how to civilise and democratise it. In this book Mark Neocleous takes an entirely different approach and offers the first fully fledged critique of security.Challenging the common assumption that treats security as an unquestionable good, Neocleous explores the ways in which security has been deployed towards a vision of social order in which state power and liberal subjectivity have been inscribed into human experience. Treating security as a political technology of liberal order-building, engaging with the work of a wide range of thinkers, and ranging provocatively across a range of subject areas - security studies and international political economy; history, law and political theory; international relations and historical sociology - Neocleous explores the ways in which individuals, classes and the state have been shaped and ordered according to a logic of security. In so doing, he uncovers the violence which underlies the politics of security, the ideological circuit between security and emergency powers, and the security fetishism dominating modern politics. Key features:• Makes original use of diverse historical materials concerning the question of security• Provides a distinctive account of theoretical debates about security within the tradition of social and political theory•

Democracy and Displacement in Colombia's Civil War is one of few books available in English to provide an overview of the Colombian civil war and drug war. Abbey Steele draws on her own original field research as well as on Colombian scholars' work in Spanish to provide an expansive view of the country's political conflicts. Steele shows how political reforms in the context of Colombia's ongoing civil war produced unexpected, dramatic consequences: democratic elections revealed Colombian citizens' political loyalties and allowed counterinsurgent armed groups to implement political cleansing against civilians perceived as loyal to insurgents. Combining evidence collected from remote archives, more than two hundred interviews, and quantitative data from the government's displacement registry, Steele connects Colombia's political development and the course of its civil war to purposeful displacement. By introducing the concepts of collective targeting and political cleansing, Steele extends what we already know about patterns of ethnic cleansing to cases where expulsion of civilians from their communities is based on nonethnic traits.

\" Myths of Empire offers the best-developed theory to date of the domestic sources of international conflict and security policy... Snyder has taken a major step toward ending the theoretical impoverishment of the study of the domestic sources of international conflict.\" ― American Political Science Review Overextension is the common pitfall of empires. Why does it occur? What are the forces that cause the great powers of the industrial era to pursue aggressive foreign policies? Jack Snyder identifies recurrent myths of empire, describes the varieties of overextension to which they lead, and criticizes the traditional explanations offered by historians and political scientists. He tests three competing theories-realism, misperception, and domestic coalition politics-against five detailed case studies: early twentieth-century Germany, Japan in the interwar period, Great Britain in the Victorian era, the Soviet Union after World War II, and the United States during the Cold War. The Resulting insights run counter to much that has been written about these apparently familiar instances of empire building. Overextension is the common pitfall of empires. Why does it occur? What are the forces that cause the great powers of the industrial era to pursue aggressive foreign policies? Jack Snyder identifies recurrent myths of empire, describes the varieties of overextension to which they lead, and criticizes the traditional explanations offered by historians and political scientists.He tests three competing theories-realism, misperception, and domestic coalition politics-against five detailed case studies: early twentieth-century Germany, Japan in the interwar period, Great Britain in the Victorian era, the Soviet Union after World War II, and the United States during the Cold War. The resulting insights run counter to much that has been written about these apparently familiar instances of empire building.

Many theories of international relations assume that public opinion exerts a powerful effect on foreign policy in democracies. Previous research, based on observational data, has reached conflicting conclusions about this foundational assumption. We use experiments to examine two mechanisms—responsiveness and selection—through which opinion could shape decisions about the use of military force. We tested responsiveness by asking members of the Israeli parliament to consider a crisis in which we randomized information about public opinion. Parliamentarians were more willing to use military force when the public was in favor and believed that contravening public opinion would entail heavy political costs. We tested selection by asking citizens in Israel and the US to evaluate parties/candidates, which varied randomly on many dimensions. In both countries, security policy proved as electorally significant as economic and religious policy, and far more consequential than nonpolicy considerations such as gender, race, and experience. Overall, our experiments in two important democracies imply that citizens can affect policy by incentivizing incumbents and shaping who gets elected.

State failure is a central challenge to international peace and security in the post-Cold War era. Yet theorizing on the causes of state failure remains surprisingly limited. InState Erosion, Lawrence P. Markowitz draws on his extensive fieldwork in two Central Asian republics-Tajikistan, where state institutions fragmented into a five-year civil war from 1992 through 1997, and Uzbekistan, which constructed one of the largest state security apparatuses in post-Soviet Eurasia-to advance a theory of state failure focused on unlootable resources, rent seeking, and unruly elites. In Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and other countries with low capital mobility-where resources cannot be extracted, concealed, or transported to market without state intervention-local elites may control resources, but they depend on patrons to convert their resources into rents. Markowitz argues that different rent-seeking opportunities either promote the cooptation of local elites to the regime or incite competition over rents, which in turn lead to either cohesion or fragmentation. Markowitz distinguishes between weak states and failed states, challenges the assumption that state failure in a country begins at the center and radiates outward, and expands the \"resource curse\" argument to include cash crop economies, where mechanisms of state failure differ from those involved in fossil fuels and minerals. Broadening his argument to weak states in the Middle East (Syria and Lebanon) and Africa (Zimbabwe and Somalia), Markowitz shows how the distinct patterns of state failure in weak states with immobile capital can inform our understanding of regime change, ethnic violence, and security sector reform.

01 02 This book applies postcolonial theory to Russia by looking at it as a subaltern empire. It pushes postcolonial studies and constructivist International Relations towards an uneasy dialogue, which produces tensions and reveals multiple blind spots in both approaches. A critical re-evaluation of the existing literature enables the author to produce a comprehensive account of how Russia's position in the international system has conditioned its domestic development, and how this in turn generated specific foreign policy outcomes. Having internalised the Eurocentric worldview, Russia is nevertheless different from the core European countries. This difference is not determined by 'culture', but rather by uneven and combined development of global capitalism, in which Russia is integrated as a semi-peripheral nation. The Russian state has colonised its own periphery on behalf of the Western core, but has never been able to overcome economic and normative dependency on the West. The peculiar dialectic of the subaltern and the imperial during the post-Soviet period has given rise to a regime which claims to defend 'genuine Russian values', while in fact there is nothing behind this new traditionalism but the negation of Western hegemony. Trying to 'defend' the nation from the postulated threat of Western interventionism, the regime engages in a disavowal of politics and thus suppresses popular subjectivity. The only political subject that remains on the horizon of Russian politics is the West, while the Russian people, as any other subaltern, are being spoken for, and thus silenced, by the country's Eurocentric elites and the Western intellectuals. 02 02 Pushing postcolonial studies and constructivist International Relations towards an uneasy dialogue, this book looks at Russia as a subaltern empire. It demonstrates how the dialectic of the subaltern and the imperial has produced a radically anti-Western regime, which nevertheless remains locked in a Eurocentric outlook. 04 02 1. The Postcolonial and the Imperial in the Space and Time of World Politics 2. Russia in/and Europe: Sources of Ambiguity 3. Material Dependency: Postcolonialism, Development and Russia's 'Backwardness' 4. Normative Dependency: Putinite Paleoconservatism and the Missing Peasant 5 The People are Speechless: Russia, the West and the Voice of the Subaltern 6. Conclusion 13 02 Viatcheslav Morozov is Professor of EU-Russia Studies at the University of Tartu. Before moving to Estonia in 2010, he taught for thirteen years at the St Petersburg State University, Russia. He is the author of Russia and the Others: Identity and Boundaries of a Political Communit y and the editor of Decentring the West: The Idea of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony .